Bloomberg Boosts Goldman’s Damage-Control Effort

Mayor Bloomberg, never to be matched in his kinglike benevolence, paid a visit to a place where absolutely no one wanted to be today: Goldman Sachs HQ in Manhattan. Stu Loeser, a spokesman for the mayor, explained: “The mayor stopped by to make clear that the company is a vital part of the city’s economy, and the kind of unfair attacks that we’re seeing can eventually hurt all New Yorkers.” Bloomberg visited this morning and met with Vampire Squid numero uno Lloyd Blankfein and other Goldman employees. The visit was not listed on Bloomberg’s publicschedule.

In a 2005 New York interview, Bloomberg explained how he lobbied former Goldman CEO (and former Secretary of the Treasury) Henry Paulson to build the company’s current HQ near groundzero.

This is where the best want to live and work. So I told him, ‘We can help with minimizing taxes. We can help with minimizing your rent. We can help with improving security. All of those kinds of things. But in the end, Hank, look, this is about people.’…Most of the guys that run these big firms, they’re my age. And because of my company, there’s a credibility. They respect somebody who’s not a politician, who’s trying to get things done. And I think it’s fair to say they like the progress in thecity.

The damage control continues after Greg Smith’s explosiveTimes op-ed. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan, sent his firm an e-mail about the op-ed that was attracting a lot of attention “around the street,” a word that means a completely different thing to Dimon than it does toyou.

“I want to be clear that I don’t want anyone here to seek advantage from a competitor’s alleged issues or hearsay – ever. It’s not the way we do business…We respect our competitors, and our focus should be on doing the best we can to continually strengthen our ownstandards.”

Perhaps the most important story to come out of this Smith debacle: The disintegrating moral fiber of Wall Street has made one recent Yale graduate decide to become a playwright instead of a hedge-fund manager. A DealBook story about Wall Street’s recent recruiting troubles includes the saga of one Cory Finley, a 23-year-old who applied to work at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut hedge fund, then decided to write a play called The Private Sector set at a hedge-fund corporate retreat. Finley, who wears a Barbour jacket and stands in front of some sort of dangerous graffiti in a photograph taken for the article, explains: “I don’t judge people who do go into finance, but it’s not for mepersonally.”

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).